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When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Maintaining relationships as a permanent traveler and entrepreneur has it’s challenges. I’ve been puzzled as to how to broach this topic here, but I recently parted ways with my (now ex-) girlfriend.

Nikki was (and always will be) a stunning, inspiring, ambitious woman. We met in Bangkok, she had built her own successful business, we saw four countries together in the last eight months alone, and together we got a beach house on beautiful Koh Phangan island in the south of Thailand. In many ways, we were the perfect travel couple. I thought I’d found the love of my life. So it’s hard to share with the whole world when you fuck something that good up.

Maybe we rushed into things. Maybe our hopes were too high. Maybe we were too alike—both A-type, hard-headed entrepreneurs, both accustomed to the ever-changing permanent travel lifestyle, and both very stubborn. We both had outside stresses, and moving from a busy city with literally hundreds of friends we could go out with nearly every day of the week, to sharing a home together for the first time, together nearly 24/7, on a small island where we didn’t know anyone, we had a few fights that escalated from bad to worse, and eventually I left Koh Phangan.

In retrospect, I don’t even remember what our arguments were about. Average disagreements, minor hurt feelings, money worries, but they would spiral out of control as we provoked each other to higher and higher stakes back and forth. Occasional fights are inevitable in long-term relationships. But perhaps we hadn’t had enough time to fully figure each other out, or maybe we both still need to learn how to handle those misunderstandings and disagreements properly with a more mature discourse.

Over the course of several months I had adjusted my business and scaled back on a lot of the projects I had been doing on my own (to clarify, she didn’t ask me to do this) to help her expand her magazine online and across Asia further. She had wanted me to potentially partner with her more officially on it, and we’d had plans to travel to South America in 2011 and do similar business there…

So when we went our separate ways, not only did I walk away from a girl that meant a tremendous amount to me, but I also became a homeless “digital drifter” again, and reverted back to solo entrepreneur. Because I had dropped a few big clients and discontinued some of the services I had been providing over the months, it’s put me at a crossroads in my business: what direction do I go? What opportunities do I get back into? Do I search for new clients or reinvent things and do something entirely new?

Not being in a committed relationship also puts me back in a position where I could almost go anywhere in the world, which is actually scary as hell. The decisions are paralyzing.

We’ve all had experiences like these—it was actually another breakup over three years ago that pushed me to move overseas—and I’ve had countless emails from readers in similar situations, who also experienced a breakup, or some other big life change.

But these big changes that we experience—losing someone you love (through a breakup, the death of someone you care about, or otherwise), having your career or your business thrown in disarray, experiencing a huge change in your living situation before you’re ready for it, trouble in your family, misunderstandings with your friends, and many other similar things—they can also bring out massive fears that—if you don’t overcome them—will put you in a rut for months or years, and may destroy you.

We may feel fear because of an experience that has happened in the past which triggers fear in the present. We might feel fear of uncertainty, or fear of the unknown. Or, we may even be frightened of doing what we’ve always wanted to do with our lives—a kind of nervous excitement, if you will.

[…] Fear is debilitating. It keeps us at a distance.  It stops us from moving forward.  It holds us back.

Our natural instinct when we begin to feel fear is avoidance.  Many people will go to unnatural extremes to avoid their fears, rather than dealing with their fear, and moving forward.”

–Brooke Ferguson

The Fear of Uncertainty

I am a firm believer that the only thing that holds you back from getting the things you want in this life is yourself—or, to be more precise, your fears.

Fear is a product of our evolution—it’s a survival response, a remnant from caveman days when we needed to remain alert and move our asses to avoid getting eaten by sabertooth tigers. But life in modern society is pretty cushy, and that inherent fear and anxiety response isn’t so useful anymore. At least I haven’t come across too many sabertooth tigers.

You’re never going to completely remove the fear. But you must master the fear if you want to be successful in life and attain your goals.

Most of us fear failure in some form or another. A lot of people stay in their 9-to-5 jobs because they fear the unknown—not having that paycheck to rely on, or they fear their own ability to go out and find enough paying clients to make a living. I experience that fear every month! Or you might fear that people will think your idea is stupid, that no one will buy. People will laugh at you because you choose to walk a different path—the unconventional path.

“Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

–Timothy Ferriss

But it’s not going to kill you to fail. Ask anyone successful how they got there, and they will undoubtedly tell you about the many, many failed ideas and failed attempts they made before they became an “overnight” success.

Failure doesn’t have the same sharp teeth and claws that it used to. If you’re trying to do big, remarkable things in business or in life, then failure is unavoidable. It’s part of the journey, part of the learning process. And in fact, failure is only going to teach you what you didn’t know already, and it will teach you lessons to apply in your next attempt at success.

One lesson that really made a huge impact on me early on, from Ramit Sethi, is that if you’re not failing at a few things each month, then you’re not trying hard enough. Ramit keeps a folder for failures, and he’s a New York Times bestselling author now.

Mountains from Molehills

Any big life change is going to feel like an insurmountable goal before you actually achieve it. The more you think about it without taking action and getting started, the more you will build it up to be a huge challenge in your head.

I remember before I finally pulled the trigger and packed my bags to live abroad in late 2008, I was scared shitless about leaving my comfortable surroundings. I thought I might end up spending a year in Asia in complete solitude. Boy did I turn out to be wrong though! I have friends now that I would never have back home—millionaires, media personalities, nightclub owners, authors, folks from all industries and from every corner of the world.

my 2nd day in Bangkok

I made it out to be a much bigger obstacle in my head than it really turned out to be. There were plenty of challenges, as I arrived in Beijing, China, just as the Bangkok airport was closed down by political demonstrations, and they wanted to turn me around and send me back to California.

But once I was moving towards my goal, once I was on the road traveling, I was surrounded by a completely new world—foreign languages I didn’t understand at all, different social norms—and it forced me to be resourceful. I had to learn and overcome the challenges, and in fact it increased the rate at which I was learning new things and becoming more resilient.

How to Royally Fuck Up a Sure Thing

Alright, so how to actually deal with the fear…

First, I want to tell you how not to deal with your fears. This is something that I’ve probably done over and over again, and one of these days I’ll have to learn that if I want a different outcome, I have to change my behavior. But I’ll share it here so hopefully you can learn a lesson from my failure.

So to go back to the breakup, a huge fear that I’ve recognized in myself is the fear that I’ll never find the kind of companionship I want—someone to share my life with. I’m not ready to settle down in one place, and I know I’m not mature enough to get hitched just yet, but I’m pretty serious when it comes to dating, and I’m looking for the right woman to join me on my unconventional journey through life—with all the ups and downs of travel and business thrown in there.

I tend to be extremely loyal when I find someone that fits—sometimes too much so. But a common fear that crops up in my relationships is that my other half isn’t as committed to the partnership.

In Nikki, I found someone who was exceptionally like-minded—she also enjoys the unleashed travel lifestyle and has the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Very rare, but we understood each other pretty damn well. We made an incredible couple, and had a brilliantly fun time, something I’ll always be thankful for. We were almost sickeningly cute at times, I’m sure.

The huge mistake I made, though, was letting the fear take control at the first sign that something was wrong. Seth Godin calls it the lizard brain—the fight or flight tendency.

When we fought, all my biggest fears came out: that she would leave me, or maybe that I wasn’t good enough for her, and that even if we did work things out, get through the argument and come to an understanding, eventually there would come a time when I wasn’t able to keep her happy and the relationship would fall apart anyway.

So rather than fully committing myself to working things out, getting through the argument and working at it to come to an understanding, which is the mature thing I should have done, I let my past experiences dictate my behavior, and I acted out of fear. I said things I didn’t mean. And at the end, I was the douchebag who walked away from her, because I feared she would dump me, and I was desperate to avoid that pain (real or imagined).

I feared a certain outcome, so rather than working hard at it and being there the way I should have, I overreacted out of fear and prematurely severed the relationship because I feared an unknown future. When I realized what a mistake I’d made, I spent a week or two trying to persuade her back with logical reasoning. This is exactly the opposite of what you should do. There’s no reasoning with someone to love you; I’d already lost her trust.

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”

–Peter Ustinov

Moral of the story: if you really want something, don’t let fear take the wheel and go into fight or flight mode. Don’t react and be a jackass when you fear an unknown outcome. Instead, stay reasonable, keep a cool head, hang in there and keep working hard, taking the steps necessary toward what you want. Because you never really know what will happen—you can’t predict the future—but a lot of people sabotage themselves, almost subconsciously, so that they don’t have to experience failure if they don’t get what they want.

This applies to relationships, but also to pretty much everything else too. Don’t do this!

Keep Your Options Open

No matter what fear you’re facing, the biggest element is that we all fear we will be ruined if we fail. Life will be over!

But that’s just not true. What you need is to figure out your options if everything goes horribly, a backup plan, if you will. A lot of times we have these fears because we don’t know what alternate options we have. So you need to spend some time and think about your options.

Tim Ferriss calls it fear-setting: you need to spend some time and think about your options if the worst case scenario happens. Try writing down exactly what would happen in the absolute worst case, if you completely and utterly fail at your goals. Then map out as many paths to recovery as you can, or alternate solutions to achieve your goal.

A few weeks after my breakup, I sat down and put together a mindmap with some of my biggest fears right now at this stage in my life: what direction to go with my business, money troubles, my fear of loneliness, and yes even the fear that I’ll never find the Mrs. Right.

Once I did this, I actually realized how many friends I had coming through to visit, how much fun was in store, I realized how many different business opportunities were already open to me, and new income streams I could start if I put in the effort, I even realized a lot of the positive things about my breakup and being on my own again. It made a huge difference in my attitude, and gave me the energy to look for new possibilities and keep pressing forward.

Once you define your worst possible outcome, and brainstorm solutions for it, you’ll see that in most cases failure will be much easier to come back from than you might fear. This should help remove a lot of the uncertainty for you in any area of your life.

Surround Yourself with Good People

I was exceptionally fortunate that I had a good friend not far from where I was: Brooke Ferguson was just a few hours away in Krabi, Thailand. I took a bus to see her, she helped me get my feet back on the ground now that I was homeless, she listened to all my braindump about what had happened, gave me lots of helpful insight, and we even got some momentum going on an exciting new project.

Several friends have actually come to visit in the last two months: Craig Gonzales, who wrote here about friendship and location independence recently, Colin Wright, Carlos Miceli, Ross Hill, Dwight Turner, Matt Goult, and others. Some were there when I needed someone to discuss my breakup and my fears with, and slowly, through many conversations, I was able to learn some important lessons and understand my mistakes a bit better.

Markus from LivingOnImpulse.com & Dwight from InSearchOfSanuk.com

Some of them were there when I just wanted to go out for drinks and a fun time. A couple joined me on the renowned rock climbing routes in Railay Beach, Krabi (which itself, like skydiving, deals with my fear of heights. Staying active, or getting involved in a new activity can be a great way to challenge yourself in new ways and overcome unique challenges that you can then also apply in other parts of your life. Like losing a toenail after four hours of climbing, and then having to climb through pitch black caves and abseil down a 100-foot limestone cliff barefoot!)

abseiling barefoot over West Railay Beach

A rare few will excel at helping guide you through your own mental process, which is exactly what Markus Urban was able to do with me when we met for a few days of food, drinks, adventure, fun, and deep conversations.

Don’t compound your fears by staying isolated from the world. Often, if you can talk things through with people who you trust, they’ll help you see new things you didn’t see on your own. Getting the support of good friends, or family, can help infuse you with the courage you need to overcome your fears. And remaining present, honest and open to old and new people around you will frequently present new opportunities that weren’t there before.

Stare Fear in the Eye

It’s likely that what you fear most is what you must do. Steve Pavlina says that whatever you fear is not really an obstacle, but a challenge that you must face:

“The reward for facing fear is that you get to be fully alive. When you turn towards your fear, you feel the breath of life blowing straight at you, and it’s very refreshing. You feel awake and energized. It’s not that you become an adrenaline junky. You simply realize that you can’t let fear stand in your way if you want to live your life consciously. Being afraid of something is no excuse for not doing it.”

–Steve Pavlina

All the big things you want to accomplish will stir up your fears to some degree, and it’s only by confronting those fears head-on that you’ll ever overcome them and achieve anything remarkable. If something seems impossible, then break it down into smaller parts, and start today on the first one that will get you going the direction you want to go.

By breaking down your huge fears into small pieces and taking action every day, you’ll start to build up resilience and tenacity in the face of those fears. And every time you have a small breakthrough or a victory over something you fear, you’ll gain more and more momentum to continue on and take on bigger and bigger challenges.

I finally decided to take initiative on a big, impossible dream I have of hosting some kind of an entrepreneurship, personal development and lifestyle design summit in the Southern California desert—a sort of unconference and retreat with inspiring, like-minded people who want to create radical change in their lives and build meaningful businesses.

As soon as I started sharing this idea with the right kind of people—a few folks who I really look up to and a few individuals who crossed paths by serendipity and shared an understanding of what change I want to make in the world—I started to get positive feedback from some who are also interested to participate and make something happen, which has given me new motivation to put in the attention and effort and make this one of my central projects in the coming months. (More on this soon, but if you want to learn from and collaborate with some remarkable people for a week in Palm Springs, say around mid-April when Coachella Music & Arts Festival is on, drop me a line.)

And in the dating arena, I’ve simply forced myself to keep being social, going out and meeting new people, bonding with new friends, and already I’ve found that there are plenty of great women out there to meet and plenty of potential for new relationships when the time is right, and maybe my huge fear that I’ll spend eternity alone isn’t true after all.

Are You Avoiding Doing Something Out of Fear?

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

–Wayne Gretzky

Consider what you have to lose by not taking action. Will you get another chance at this? Are you happy with things as they are now, or are you miserable? Will you choose unhappiness over uncertainty?

The key to achieving your wildest goals in life is to overcome the fears that hold you back, and to question your assumptions. The more certainty you require in life, the more you will be let down and unhappy. The people who succeed are the ones who accept that much of life is uncertain, and every day will serve up new challenges. Sometimes you’ll feel prepared to handle them, but most of the time you probably won’t. You must learn to adapt quickly to change, seek out how you can turn uncertainty to your benefit, and stop being a victim—but instead start looking for the lessons you can learn from life’s challenges to make you stronger.

Here are four lessons I’ve learned as I’ve overcome big challenges and faced my fears:

1. If you feel pulled towards something, embrace it and race toward it.
2. Big life changes are never as scary as you make them out to be in your head at first.
3. No matter what happens, you will adapt to new surroundings and new things in your life surprisingly quickly.
4. Even if your plans don’t unfold how you want them to, at the very least you will experience growth and learn valuable lessons along the way.

The willingness to risk the comfort of the familiar in order to find your true happiness is the path to living a remarkable life.

“Winners expect and embrace failure as something that will remain constant throughout their lives. No matter how successful they are in whatever they do, they will have the failures to go alongside it.

Every winner out there has had to first become a Master of Failure before enjoying the winning side of life.”

–Kevin Abdulrahman

There always have been and always will be a small subset of the population who lead remarkable lives. They choose not to allow fear—of the unknown, of uncertainty, of failure—to hold them back from doing big things. They take action in the face of fear. The question is: will you choose to be one of them? Will you overcome your fears and live a remarkable life?

If So, the World Is Your Oyster!

Image: Anton Balazh

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How to Keep Kicking Ass When You Lose Everything

This week, surprisingly, I went to church. There was a time you could have found me in church, but it’s typically not a place for me anymore.

On this particular Friday night, I was invited by my friend Ryan for an Arabic food dinner, and though the church is a Protestant one, my understanding was this was supposed to be some sort of celebration for Ramadan. Ramadan is the Islamic month of fasting, and Muslims practice self-restraint, extra time in prayer and concentration on spirituality.

How Christians Celebrate Ramadan

Free food had attracted a rather diverse group of folks, and I’m fairly certain I wasn’t the only one there who’s not a normal churchgoer. I thought, hey, this is typically a pretty progressive, cool community of Christians, and hey, how cool of them to get together to talk about what this important religious holiday means for another faith community.

Someone, apparently not the normal pastor, stood up in front of the group and started off telling us about how deep a Muslim’s faith runs. The call to prayer, about God’s greatness and how Muhammad is his messenger, is the first thing that a father says to his newborn child and the last thing people recite over your body before they put you six feet under. It can be heard five times a day being chanted from every mosque across the globe. I give them great props for how central they make that in their lives. (Actually for folks who believe in a supreme being, I think Christians could learn a thing or two from many of those ceremonial practices.)

Then the propaganda leaflets started coming out. The speaker started talking about how much of a “foothold” this gives the Islamic religion in people’s lives. And how only we can save them and show them the light. Alright, I thought, so this is how this is gonna go. Y’all are gonna rag on Muslims, talk about how they’re wrong, and then have the gall to eat their food! And that is how you celebrate another culture’s great tradition.

After listening to about one minute and fifteen seconds of this, I stood up and dismissed myself. Although I don’t think my friends share the same sentiment as the group leader that night, I later related to them:

The word Muslim means “servant of God.” They believe in the same damned god as Christians and Jews. Asking them to give up something that is so central in their culture and their identities is akin to asking someone to change the color of their skin. That’s not my idea of a celebration of Ramadan, and it’s certainly not a celebration of any of the extensive shared heritage of these two belief systems.

Most people are ignorant and uninformed (or misinformed) when it comes to other religions. I think it would behoove Christians to learn more about the facts about Jesus’ role in Islam. His name, ‘Īsā, is found 25 times in the Qur’an.

Herman Roborgh, PhD in Islamic Studies, in an article on the paradoxes of Christianity and Islam, states:

Christians and Muslims regard their own faith as the true way yet also affirm the truth of other paths.

It is clear that, for Christians, Christ is the Way to God. Yet Jesus is also presented as saying, ‘many will come from the east and the west to take their places with Abraham’. The Catholic Church acknowledges that those outside the community of the Church can attain salvation, thereby recognising the value of other paths to God.

Similarly, the Qur’an says that God has chosen Islam as the true religion: ‘Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed my blessing upon you, and chosen as your religion Islam.’ But the Qur’an also acknowledges the faith of those outside the community of Muslims: ‘The (Muslim) believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good—will have their rewards with the Lord.’

We Need to Find Common Ground

I spent my time at university studying religions, history and humanities: comparing the fundamentals of Theravada Buddhism (prevalent throughout Southeast Asia) and Christianity, Qur’anic schools of jurisprudence, Calvinist and Catholic theology, orthodox Christian dogma versus liberal Biblical criticism. For my senior thesis, I wrote a historiography of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship and examined how those manuscripts have impacted the study of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.

I was always looking for commonalities, but it still seems that the loudest voices in every religious community are always shouting and bickering about differences.

Sam Harris, a leading atheist and author of The End of Faith, says that people must embrace rationalism, not faith—otherwise they will never overcome their differences:

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them. Propositions like ‘Jesus is going to come back in the next fifty years and rectify every problem that human beings create’—or, in the Muslim world, ‘death in the right circumstances leads directly to Paradise.’ These beliefs are not very contaminated with good evidence.

[…] this whole style of believing and talking about beliefs leaves us powerless to overcome our differences from one another. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.

[…] Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we’re not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world. [Emphasis added]

Religion is responsible for a majority of the wars, genocides, and other atrocities that have befallen us throughout all of human history.

We are still doing the same thing. We think we’re so advanced, so evolved. But we haven’t learned a damned thing from thousands of years of history. When are we going to grow the hell up?

Steve Pavlina, a trusted authority in the blogosphere and personal development circles, says that we must graduate from Christianity:

To its credit Christianity does a decent job of stressing the importance of Love. Jesus’ teachings are all about unconditional love. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Turn the other cheek.” Those are worthy messages. Unfortunately the Church doesn’t do a good job of modeling this ideal in practice. It encourages separation between Christians and non-Christians. It creates division instead of promoting unity. You’re either saved or you’re not. Many Christians are raised to be rather unloving toward non-Christians, including the priests themselves. That is unfortunate because this is not at all what Jesus taught.

Christianity does a poor job of embracing Truth. It claims to value honesty and it does promote some degree of self-awareness, but that’s about it. Beyond that it markets a variety of fictional stories as indisputable truth. It doesn’t teach people to accurately interpret and accept what their senses tell them. And it largely ignores the importance of prediction. The lack of Truth-alignment is why many Christians find this belief system largely unhelpful in their day-to-day practical lives. So they’re Christians on Sundays but not on weekdays. Because Christianity is disconnected from Truth, it’s out of touch with reality. If you want to grow in your career, finances, or health while maintaining a strong spiritual focus, you’re basically on your own.

Christianity falls flat in the area of Power too. It teaches people to become dependent on the Church for spiritual guidance instead of cultivating real power as independent conscious beings. It promotes fear and timidity instead of courage. It teaches you to give your power away to an external authority instead of developing your own authority and creativity as a conscious being.

If you want to create an effective moral code for yourself, it must be solidly grounded in reality (aligned with Truth), it must help you cultivate a sense of unconditional love and connection (aligned with Love), and it must empower you to grow (aligned with Power). If it fails to satisfy any of these conditions, then your moral code is ultimately turning you away from conscious growth.

My Experience with Religion

I was raised with a mixed but fairly religious background. In college, I read the Bible cover-to-cover. I was closely involved with a Christian fellowship group: I lead Bible studies, I contributed to an online publication, I even became a vice president for the campus organization. I thought I had “found” religion for myself, and I wanted a deeper understanding of my own faith and that of others, so I chose to major in Humanities & Religious Studies. I spent three years desperately seeking to understand, to believe, and to be accepted within that community of believers.

When my good friend Chris died in 2004, people who think this way told me that he would burn for eternity in hell because he wasn’t a Christian. That was an absurd idea which didn’t align with my experience and will forever stand out in my mind, because my best friend was a far more caring, thoughtful person to me—a true brother—than any member of this new faith community I was striving to be a part of. Chris would have given anything for me.

I could never believe in an angry god like that. I have my own ideas about the transcendent—some form of higher power that could never possibly be understood by our little human brains but that one could label “God”. And I have my own sort of spiritual practices: I find God in the sublime—the great, powerful, beautiful forces of nature and the outdoors.

I pay my respect to that higher power by pouring my love into other people: by striving to be a decent person, a helpful, loving friend, and by giving back to those in need.

People Make the World What It Is.

Whether you believe in God or not, we have to take responsibility. We can’t hold some god, nor devil, or ghosts or spirits accountable for how messed up things are. Nobody is accountable for the sins of his father, but we all screw things up in our own way. We are the ones who fail to sell all our belongings and give our money to the poor, the ones who don’t love our neighbors, don’t turn the other cheek, who can’t be bothered to ensure that the innocent children of the world are given access to decent health care. Nobody is innocent here, no church, no faith—not in my book.

I have the utmost reverence for people of all faiths, and complete respect for an individual’s personal beliefs. But organized religion perpetuates the differences that divide us, it perpetuates hate, it stagnates progress and peace. Religion encourages xenophobia: irrational fear of foreign or different ideas and people. And these are beliefs which I do not and can not ever share.

We must take personal responsibility for making things right—we can’t leave it up to some higher power to make the world a better place. And we must overcome divisiveness and unite humankind as a whole.

Further reading:

• Jesus in Islam – Wikipedia article
• Paradoxes of Christianity and Islam – Herman Roborgh
• How to Graduate from Christianity – Steve Pavlina
• Why Religion Must End – interview with Sam Harris
  

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Quit Trying to Convert Me Because It Ain’t Gonna Happen

Personally, I’m a big fan of productivity lists, how-to’s, and life hacks, so my custom search engine includes a lot of big name sites like Lifehacker, Zen Habits, Tim Ferriss’ 4HWW blog, and many more. Anytime I’m curious how to do something, like how to install a certain software application, how to improve my resume, or how to get the most out of a particular social networking site for instance, my custom-build search engine returns incredible results! And if you like to hyperlink to other resources and articles as additional support when you write new blog posts, this will serve as a fantastic tool for you just like it has for me.

I highly recommend Google’s Custom Search, and since I’ve already done the work and compiled a master list of over 50 of the web’s most credible and authoritative blogs, I’d also like to introduce my own Thrilling Blog Search engine as an open community tool for the Brazen Careerist network and the blogosphere at large. Try it out. Seriously! It provides some really cool results for all sorts of subjects from personal development to social media to finance. Link to the search engine page here and try a search for “resume,” “savings account,” or “LinkedIn” for example:

If you’d like to utilize this tool for your own blogging workflow, feel free to bookmark my directory/links page, or you can easily add it to your iGoogle homepage or your own website. Be aware that this search engine already crawls several of the most trusted blogs on the internet, but I will be adding to the sites in the future. If you’d like to contribute to the project or suggest a site for addition, you can get in touch with me but be aware there will be a strict review process. In other words, if you email me with a suggestion, you better be ready to pitch your site and why the community will benefit from it!

Here are the top-notch blogs/bloggers that are already a part of this fun customized blog community search tool:

Personal Growth/Productivity

• Lifehacker
• Zen Habits
• Steve Pavlina
• LifeDev
• Life Optimizer
• The Positivity Blog
• Scott H Young
• Duff McDuffee
• Today Is That Day

Career/Personal Branding

• Personal Branding Blog
• Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk
• Life Beyond Code
• Water Cooler Wisdom
• Personal PR
• Newly Corporate
• The Urban Muse
• PR Interactive
• Erik Folgate

Lifestyle Design/Travel

• The 4-Hour Workweek
• Anywired
• The Art of Nonconformity
• Real Social Dynamics
• Ronnie Nurss
• Brave New Traveler

Generation-Y Issues

• Employee Evolution
• Twenty Set
• WorkLoveLife

Personal Finance

• I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• Get Rich Slowly

Freelancing/Entrepreneurship

• FreelanceSwitch
• Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Erica Douglass
• How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki
• The Anti 9-to-5 Guide
• Instigator Blog
• College-Startup
• Jamie Harrop

Social Media/Technology

• Chris Brogan
• Dosh Dosh
• Copyblogger
• Tobias Baeck
• Paul Stamatiou
• Greg Rollett
• Moving From Me to We
• Paul Woods

Blogging/WordPress

• ProBlogger
• Pearsonified
• Theme Playground
• Blog Perfume
• Lorelle on WordPress
• Thrilling Design

Remember, this is a community project, so please feel free to get involved!

» Add a search widget to your Google homepage.

» Add the custom Thrilling Blog Search to your own site.

» Get in touch if you’ve got a suggested site that will benefit other bloggers and readers.

» Blog about this or tell your friends about the Thrilling Blog Search engine!

These are just the first round of additions to the Thrilling Blog Search community search tool. As I come across more great sites, I’ll be updating the list and the search engine tool. You can view several of my favorite blogs and suggested resources, as well as my custom Thrilling Blog Search tool on my Links Page here.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Announcing an Awesome New Community Search Tool for the Blogosphere!

1. A while ago I remember you were very keen on going to study at Stanford. Are you still with that goal?

2. What new changes are you planning for Thrilling Heroics?

3. If you’re planning to detach your income from your time (as so brilliantly put by [Steve Pavlina in this podcast]) how do you plan to do it?

I ask these questions out of curiosity and as I too am facing them in my own version of things, I’d like to hear your approach to them. To be more specific, I’ve had a long-running goal of going to film school, I’m currently in the process of making some changes to my blog and I’m interested in the concept of detaching my income from my time.

I thought these great questions deserved a little more in-depth discussion, and they give me a perfect opportunity to recommit to my mission here at ThrillingHeroics.com and share some of the plans for its development in 2008, so I’m happy to answer them here on TH with this post!

Revamping Thrilling Heroics for 2008

New Developments & Directions
Some great news — ThrillingHeroics.com has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of blogs to join the new Brazen Careerist blog network! I’m deeply flattered to be chosen by Penelope Trunk and the guys at Employee Evolution, and I’ll be honored to work alongside some other fantastic Gen-Y career bloggers.

Thrilling Heroics has evolved and changed over time alongside my interests and pursuits, and it will continue to do so, but I remain committed to my central mission: to inspire and empower others to pursue their dreams and goals in the face of adversity. The discussion is concentrated more in the direction of personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central message is the same, with a new twist: namely, Thrilling Heroics is a career-oriented resource for college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design.” Above all, I am passionate to encourage Generation-Y readers to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon!

TH started out with strong foundations in green business and social entrepreneurship. But whatever your interests, what remains central to the purpose of Thrilling Heroics is to empower the members of our generation to “think outside the box” of traditional work and traditional business, and really take advantage of all the things that are at our disposal to achieve our wildest dreams. Yes, that’s right — the ones you had when you were a kid. The world is your oyster! Whether your goals are to save the planet or to be the next CEO of GE! Join with other college students and young leaders who want to excel, make their dreams reality, and change the world. Watch as I experiment with entrepreneurship, living the mobile lifestyle, and practicing personal development and growth. Follow my adventures by subscribing to the blog, and share your own adventures as well!

New Format & Improved Features
For 2008, I will renew my commitment to sharing great content with you here at TH regularly, and the strong focus on career development and personal growth will hopefully manifest itself in several ways over the next few months: you should see a fresh, new, more personal design; articles will be organized into new categories and more useful chunk content; I’ve selected a new motto based on input from dozens of friends and colleagues; and I’ll continue to work hard to bring you great interviews within two new series: “Bright Young Minds” with young professionals who are making a difference, and “Proven Success,” a series where we’ll learn from the successes of established entrepreneurs and leaders. Check in later this week for an exclusive new interview with “Duff” McDuffy from Falling Fruit TV — Conscious Media for People Who Care!

Other features in the works include my definitive guide to networking, an introduction to lifestyle design, and further discussion of leadership, travel, personal finance, and personal growth. I’ll be serving up more consistent updates and sharing new, exciting content as I write from my experiences with personal entrepreneurship, and experiments with remote work, living the mobile lifestyle, and geoarbitrage. This is an adventure, so come along with me for the ride and learn from my successes and failures!

Help Me Create a Community for Young Professionals Who Want to Rock Their Careers!
I’ll be looking for guest writers that are interested to share their own stories. Other young bloggers who want to help encourage college students and Gen-Y workers to reach for their dreams, apply here! And to encourage user participation and build a true community, I’d like to potentially set up community forums to continue the discussion beyond the blog posts! That’s up to you guys too, though, so please help me spread the good word about Thrilling Heroics and tell your friends and colleagues. Get involved in the comments, submit your own ideas, and help me encourage our generation to kick ass and take life by the horns! Remember that my mission is to build your confidence to succeed, and to help you realize the freedom and flexibility to invest your time doing what you are truly passionate about.

Cody’s Entrepreneurial Roadmap

Freelancing & Entrepreneurship
To answer questions 1 and 3 above, let me start with the personal side. In the last three months, I left my traditional office job to pursue my true passion and I have been experimenting with freelancing and entrepreneurship. This is why I’ve been somewhat absent from Thrilling Heroics recently — I’ve been very busy with my freelance web development projects and laying the foundations of a business! I now work solely as a freelance web designer and consultant, building WordPress-powered blogs for professionals and small companies. I enjoy serving all kinds of clients, but work particularly well with other professional consultants who want to build up their personal brand, authors and columnists interested in transitioning to a web 2.0 platform, or speakers and coaches who seek to build an online community of raving fans! Some of my recent projects include Life Beyond Code, Moving From Me to We, HighlyObsessed.com, and TomAlexander.com.

I am in the very beginning stages, but my eventual goal is to incorporate and build my own web design company. In the next few months, you should see a full-fledged new business and website dedicated to my freelance design services, and at some point I may need to build a team from among my network of designers and creative-types — or outsource to other freelancers to help me increase my project capacity. This is not something I plan to do for my entire career, nor is it the only project I plan to have going at any one time, but over the next few years my end goal is to create a business that I own. The advantage of being owner, as opposed to president or CEO of a company, is that you profit from a company without necessarily having to run the business. (Not that there isn’t work to be done — but you hire smarter people to maintain things for you.)

How To Automate Your Income
Now to truly separate my income from my time, I plan to generate products that can bring in recurring income. You create it once, and see the profits from it repeatedly. Zen Habits has a great article on automating your income that discusses turning your service into a product:

Do you currently provide a service? If so, you have to devote many hours each week to provide that service. However, if you can turn that service into a product, such as a book or DVD or web site or CD, you can create it once and sell it over and over. Brainstorm the best way to create a product that gives customers the same information or skills that they would get from you in person.

Leo also goes on to speak about other forms of automated income:

Instead of creating an information product, you could create a real-world product, such as a gadget or nutrition product. Freelance designers can turn your idea into an actual design, and contract manufacturers can turn the design into a product. Other types of automated incomes include real estate, online retail businesses (including an eBay business), affiliate marketing, a blog, and a membership-type website. There are many possibilities. Find ways to turn your strengths into a revenue generator.

On my new web design blog, I hope to provide valuable free content, such as WordPress and business blogging how-to’s and instructional training videos that will attract both web design contracts and point users to products like website templates, podcasts, and eBooks that they can purchase from my site.

How To Get Into a Top University
Finally, I do still plan to apply to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but not for a while. Once I prove myself with a few more years of career experience, either through the success or failure of my business and other professional pursuits, I feel I’ll be more qualified to work alongside other entrepreneurs and young leaders at one of the world’s best B-schools! I still maintain my strong interest in studying green business and social entrepreneurship at the University’s Center for Social Innovation and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, but of course, coming from a not-quite-so-prestigious state school, it will be quite a challenge. For anyone who wants to apply to a big, competitive university, the keys are to show your dedication to achievement and personal growth, and to convince the program’s admissions officers that you’ll do great things with a degree from their school. Also, it doesn’t hurt to build relationships with faculty or with members of the alumni network from the school you hope to attend! Here are more valuable tips from Penelope Trunk.

I’ll be sure to post more about my personal goals and my 2008 resolutions very soon, so stay tuned for that before the New Year if you’d like to learn more.

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I will be leaving to travel overseas at the end of the week (spending the holidays in Spain), but read my upcoming interview with Duff McDuffee — Co-Founder of Falling Fruit TV, philosopher, life coach, and yogin — in the next few days! Duff will share some great thoughts on things from conscious business to GTD to Buddhism!

Thanks again to Gautam for the great questions! Gautam Valluri is a friend from the blogosphere, a sharp young filmmaker, writer, and designer in Hyderābād, India. He does some fantastic exclusive interviews at BrokenProjector.com.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: It’s Time for Some Thrilling Heroics: Commit to Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams with Me in 2008!

I left my full-time employment at Sacramento State University almost two months ago, after which I took a short break while my broken hand was healing. I continued to do my freelance web design, and then I also took a temp job with my stepmom’s company in Roseville. I worked just four days a week helping the scientific company rebuild their website. The experience was valuable, and the people were great. But I was still working in a cubicle, taking assignments from someone else without having any creative input. When I stepped back and thought about the bigger picture, this still wasn’t getting me any closer to the lifestyle and the career I truly desire.

So I left that job after only three weeks, even though the pay was great and I was making more in four days than I had in five days per week previously. I decided that if I don’t devote myself–all of my time and energy right now–to doing what I really am passionate about, I may very well never take that big, scary step. Right now, when I’m young and have no car payment, no mortgage, no wife, no kids–that is the time to take a risk and see if I can work for myself or start a company!

I’m tired of being an employee. I know I haven’t done it for very long compared to some of you, and I haven’t “paid my dues.” But, I know that’s not the life I want. I want to be in control of my own time. I want to be in charge of my own personal and professional development. I want to decide what tasks inspire me enough to take on. I just had to realize that I have skills that other professionals are ready to pay me for! In some areas, I have a lot of knowledge that can benefit others. So I started designing small webpages for professionals and small businesses. Creating blogs as public relations tools for small companies, and doing technical consulting on the software and programming used to create and run them (I work with the WordPress open-source content management system, so if you or any of your friends need technical assistance, consulting, or web design, please get in touch!).

So I’ve been working on my freelance web design and business blog consulting full-time for a week and a half now. It’s a brand new experience that I’ve just started, and I realize that it will take some time to adjust to (and it will take some time to be lucrative). Other reasons that I decided to quit “work” and eliminate a few other things from my plate right now include focus on healing my fractured hand, keeping a schedule that agrees more with my own circadian rhythm, and practicing a healthier lifestyle…so I am perfectly happy to take it slow and accomplish one goal at a time. But in the first week I have already experienced a few of the challenges that await me: we become so trained in school and the traditional workplace to accept tasks from someone above us–staying motivated and determining the priority of tasks is a new experience to get used to; and the workplace does provide one thing even I can’t live without–interaction with other people! Adjusting to the frequent social isolation of working for yourself/by yourself is tough too.

Regardless, I chose to make the change. At least for now. I enjoy the work that I do–I am able to keep learning and growing, I get to be more flexible with my time, and I get to work with new, diverse groups of people from time to time. I’m self-employed, and my long-term goal is to set up the infrastructure of a full-fledged, legitimate business. Start my own design and consulting firm! It’s a lot of work–defining specifically what products and services I offer and what I don’t, conveying that concretely for the non-technical client, refining the business process, setting up the DBA and tax paperwork, and possibly writing a business plan and trying for a small business loan. Maybe I will fail…but either way I will learn a LOT along the way.

I’ve also studied a lot about automating my income, lifestyle design, and geo-arbitrage. Tim Ferriss talks at length about these exciting concepts in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. And I recently came across an older yet fantastic podcast from Steve Pavlina in which he discusses moving away from trading your time for money. Eventually, I would like to shift my paradigm from thinking of myself as merely self-employed to being a business owner. As Pavlina discusses, the idea is to detach your time from your income, put your income on autopilot, through generating information products for instance, that can earn you residual income, even while you sleep. Or I could develop my web sites further, and try to monetize them. He says how his multiple streams of passive income allow him to spend the bulk of his time doing what he is passionate about, regardless of whether or not it is profitable. Eventually, I would love to develop this business structure, so that my work is less of a means to pay the bills, and more a way to express my passions and continue to learn and grow.

Keep me in your thoughts. Your motivational words (and small contributions to my startup fund!) mean a lot. =)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Experimenting with Career Options